UNEMPLOYMENT; STUDY, AND RESEARCH 49
During this period I came into contact with many other striking
personalities, whose thoughts and example helped to shape and
guide my activities, and I look back to my association with them
with great pleasure and with indebtedness for all that they taught
me. A vast number of orthodox people find it consoling to believe
that those who are unable to accept the religious dogmas of their
age, are sceptics because they desire to free themselves from the
restraints that religion imposes upon the sincere believer, I have
many times heard clergymen and ministers, who were sufficiently
educated to have known better, declare that sceptics preferred doubt
to faith, because it left them free to live in accordance with their
natural impulses. I have had the privilege during the last forty-
five years of knowing, in some cases intimately, all the leading
secularists in England, and with complete sincerity I avow that, in
personal character, in their devotion to truth, in their relations with
their fellows, whether judged as friends or as colleagues, as business
associates, or as teachers, they were not shamed when compared
with their orthodox neighbours, while as citizens they were fre-
quently an example of what enlightened citizenship should be.
People who are able to believe without effort or misgiving the
ready-made creeds of their fathers, are not called upon to experience
the inner stress of those who, unable to accept as true and final the
current faiths, are compelled to search for peace in untrodden fields.
Many of those who consider themselves entitled to judge the
sceptic, assume that a man can believe or not believe as he pleases,
and that if he rejects what they accept it is because he is wilfully
perverse and wicked. They no more understand the spiritual
experiences of a creative mind than a cow understands the beauty
of a sunset, nor can they realize that those who prefer to worship
at other altars, or at none, judged by any test of goodness as we
understand it, may be even superior to those who, with uncom-
prehending lethargy, accept the theological assumptions of their
time. The fact that millions of Jews, Buddhists, Muhammadans,
and Hindus, who have never heard of the doctrines they themselves
regard as essential to the good life, are in moral stature equal with
themselves, adds neither to their charity nor to their understanding.
Intolerance towards the unorthodox was more marked two
generations ago than it is to-day, when much that the sceptic then
challenged has been abandoned. He had then to face not only
social ostracism, but also economic persecution. He was thought
of, and frequently treated, a^ an intellectual and moral leper.